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ORIGINAL RESEARCHMichael Winship Public Television's Mystery MannIn the current controversy over the possible elimination of Federal funding for PBS The May 2 New York Times reported, "Without the knowledge of his board... Tomlinson contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, 'Now with Bill Moyers.'" The [Mann] data [on Moyers' show] "is unusual and strange," Sen. Dorgan said. "We have all of these sheets that describe the guests and it says: anti-Bush, anti-Bush, pro-Bush, anti-Bush. It appears to me to be not so much an evaluation of is this slanted, is it liberal, does it have an agenda; it is the evaluation of is this program critical of the President?" (In the interest of full disclosure, and as previously stated, over the years, off and on, I have been a Moyers colleague and employee.) In a June 16 follow-up, Times reporter Stephen Labaton revealed that CPB's inspector general has been investigating $14,170 in payments to an Indiana man named Fred Mann under contracts "which Mr. Tomlinson took the unusual step of signing personally" for the report on the Moyers program. This, and $15,000 in payments to two Republican lobbyists, Labaton wrote, "are part of a broader examination by the inspector general of Mr. Tomlinson's efforts to bring what he says is more political balance to public television and radio and what critics say is political interference in programming." As to the author of the Moyers report, the Times reported, "Mr. Mann, who was listed in the contracts as living in Indianapolis, could not be located, and officials at the corporation said they knew nothing about him." Here's what I know. Although as of this writing he has yet to return phone calls or e-mail's from me or other journalists, I know that Fred Mann - to put it mildly -- has a history of involvement with conservative politics. There's little information about him to be found via Google or other Internet searches, but a portrait emerges via those with whom he has been associated. In 1997-98, reporting in Insight on the News, the bi-weekly owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, its senior writer David Webster (now an associate professor of law at Pat Robertson's Regent University) used Mann as a source several times. Webster described him as a veteran, Washington-based conservative and GOP consultant, and in one article as "a self-styled 'old right' consultant and commentator who handled Dan Quayle's successful challenge to Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh in 1980." During the mid-to-late eighties, Mann did some writing himself, political analyses in the conservative journal National Review. Now believed in poor health, Mann's most recent position was as director of the job bank and alumni services at the National Journalism Center in Herndon, Virginia. The National Journalism Center trains and finds internships and jobs for conservative journalists at newspapers, wire services and magazines, including the Washington bureau of Reader's Digest, of which Tomlinson was editor-in-chief. The National Journalism Center is administered by the Young America's Foundation, which is, in turn, affiliated with the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom. The foundation describes itself as "the principal outreach organization of the Conservative Movement." The National Journalism Center's alumni include Ann Coulter, Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member John Fund and Maggie Gallagher, the writer who was paid by the Department of Health and Human Service to perform promotion work for the Bush administration's marriage promotion initiative -- while at the same time extolling it in her column. The Center has received funding from Exxon Mobil and Philip Morris as well as the right-wing John M. Olin and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations. The objective of the Bradley Foundation has been described by the liberal Center for Media and Democracy as "to return the U.S. -- and the world -- to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism: capitalism with the gloves off." The full Mann report on Moyers has yet to be released to the public, but in remarks delivered on the Senate floor last week, North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan reported that at his request he had received from Ken Tomlinson the "raw data" used in the report. The data "is unusual and strange," Sen. Dorgan said. "We have all of these sheets that describe the guests and it says: anti-Bush, anti-Bush, pro-Bush, anti-Bush. It appears to me to be not so much an evaluation of is this slanted, is it liberal, does it have an agenda; it is the evaluation of is this program critical of the President?" He notes that conservative Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel "appeared on one of the programs, and he apparently disagreed with a portion of President Bush's strategy with respect to Iraq. So my colleague, Senator Hagel, is referred to as liberal. My guess is that is going to surprise a lot of Nebraskans." I detail all of this to make a single, cogent point: Mr. Tomlinson wrote PBS President Pat Mitchell that the Moyers show "does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting." But who does Tomlinson hire to measure the program's "left-wing bias?" Not an objective observer but someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum, someone guaranteed to buttress Tomlinson's pre-existing prejudice. It's just one in a series of misdeeds, including Tomlinson's efforts to make Patricia Harrison, a fiercely partisan former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, the new president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and e-mail's leaked to the New York Times and National Public Radio disproving Tomlinson's claim that the White House has not attempted to meddle with CPB and public broadcasting content. What it suggests is a concerted attempt to remove from the air sources of information more comprehensive than most found in the commercial spectrum, part of a broader effort to keep the public in the dark about the policies and actions of the current administration. For Tomlinson, it adds up to a single, cogent word of advice: Resign. copyright 2005 Messenger Post Newspapers sign in, or register to email stories or comment on them.
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MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs'Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism' On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
Bill Berkowitz Neil Bush of Saudi ArabiaDuring recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Bill Berkowitz Newt Gingrich's back door to the White HouseAmerican Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
Bill Berkowitz American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against IranDespite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Bill Berkowitz After six years, opposition gaining on George W. Bush's Faith Based InitiativeUnmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Berkowitz Frank Luntz calls Republican leadership in Washington 'One giant whining windbag'On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
Bill Berkowitz Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouseFueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bill Berkowitz Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action jihadFounder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiatives Fresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states."
Bill Berkowitz Tom Tancredo's missionThe Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Bill Berkowitz Institute on Religion and Democracy slams 'Leftist' National Council of ChurchesNew report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
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